Tuesday, 3 March 2015

Before we turn out the lights

A few weeks ago, the decision was made to shut down Blinkbox Books, the company that I’ve been working for over the last year and a half. Tesco, the owner of the Blinkbox group, has had a rough time financially and decided to regroup and re-focus, shedding the parts of the company that’s not part of its core business (i.e. running supermarkets). Our colleagues in Blinkbox Movies and Music have luckily found new owners, but talks about the Books business did not lead to any conclusion, so that is now being wound down.

This is a shame of course, as the Books business had great potential, and I was fortunate to work with a lot of bright, enthusiastic people there. In the midst of the bad news though, there are a couple of bright points. Crucially, our book customers will not lose out, as their ebook libraries will find a new home at Kobo. Also, I’m very happy that our managment agreed to let us make our code open source before we shut up shop, so we spent the last week in the office putting the code up on GitHub.

I think open sourcing the code is a very worthwhile step to take. It’s obviously satisfying for us who have worked on it for a long time to not see our efforts disappear into the ether. But I think it’s valuable beyond that too. It can serve as an example of what the codebase for a non-trivial digital business looks like. Most of the time, commercial companies rely on prioprietary code kept behind closed doors. This inhibits learning, reuse and makes it harder to improve the state of the art. There’s a wealth of open source code out there of course, but this is often libraries, tools, frameworks and middleware. Seeing actual business applications released as open source is much more rare.

Also, consider the amount of effort and energy that goes into building startups. We know that most startups fail, that’s part of the game. But wouldn’t it be of great benefit to the software community if all the code produced by these (assuming the IP isn’t resellable in itself) could be made available for later use?

Before I delve into the code we’ve relased, some words about the big picture: Blinkbox Books ran an online shop for buying ebooks, and had client apps for reading these. The back-end platform consisted of a mix of services written in Scala, Ruby and Java. We used RabbitMQ for messaging, Solr and ElasticSearch for search, and MySQL and PostgreSQL for persistence. We had a fully featured web site that included the ability to read samples of epub books. And we had iOS and Android client apps for reading these books (the Android app also including a shop for books, while Apple AppStore rules precluded that for the iOS version). Clients talked to the back-end services via RESTful APIs. Internally, we also had a content management system for managing the hundreds of thousands of ebooks that we were selling (and the many that we decided not to sell!). And there were applications for performing reporting and analysis of sales and other commercial data.

That covers a wide range of functionality, and anyone with an interesting in digital media or ecommerce could probably find something of interest. I won’t try to describe it all here, I’d just like to highlight some points of interest.

This code isn’t perfect, of course. Looking back on it, there are many parts we wanted to change, but didn’t get around to. In fact, we were well underway working on replacing some of these services when the company hit the bumpers. Also, the shutdown of the company happened quickly, so things were moved to GitHub in not much time - there will be omissions and errors.

Still, looking at all of this, I think it represents a very valuable set of resources that can and hopefully will be of use to others - even after the lights at Blinkbox Books are turned out and the last line of code committed. If you do find something of interest, please share, it would be great to hear about it.